Ran Slavin

Battlefields is a three-channel video installation that, through drone footage, explores the ruins and debris of five military sites scarred by combat exercises. To these scars on the earth’s surface Ran Slavin contrasts the sinuosities of the human anatomy. Manoeuvred from military centres thousands of miles from their targets, drones are now a military tool of surgical precision, making them the most explicit example of the transformation of warfare in the 21st century.
The three largest producers of drones are the United States, China and Israel, with the latter nation being the largest exporter and among the first to use them militarily, as early as the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In this video, Slavin explores the ruins left on the battlefields and through artificial drone vision wanders among these ruins – tangible evidence of the madness of war. This battered landscape contrasts with the footage of a female body, which, Slavin suggests, has been simultaneously exploited and abused by men. Battlefield thus becomes an elegy on war, love and pain.